Friday, 19 July 2013

I've just finished a tidying up of my home network, the main reason behind this is that I wanted to use Bitcasa to back up my data to the cloud but my little Asus EEE Box is only 32 bit and the Linux client is 64 bit. I put Windows 7 on which took an age and then it worked until I started sharing folders out, the Windows was either to everyone or needed a username and password, there didn't seem to be an easy way to have both type of sharing enabled. And then one of my 1Tb drives kept going offline, when plugged into the Windows machine and my Linux Mint desktop machine.

I persevered for a day with the Windows machine wanting to reboot to install updates and then I gave up. At this point I downloaded the latest PCLinuxOS minime ISO and installed it in about 15 minutes on the EEEBox, all the hardware worked. I then needed to plug in my external drives, create mount points and mount them, then setup NFS exports and Windows shares. All this in your average Ubuntu distro means opening up terminal and getting your hands dirty, in PCLinuxOS it's simple, open up control centre and you can give your machine a new network name, install NFS and Samba, add Samba users all from a nice easy to use GUI, it's simple, easy and just works.

And the most impressive thing for me is that the failing drive has now been running for 3 days without a murmur, not only is it a brilliant distro but it heals hard drives too.

I still use a live version of this on a CD and a USB drive for data recovery when an OS is beyond help or to prove to a customer that their problem is software related and not hardware.

As for Bitcasa, I've currently got the 64 bit alpha version running on my desktop which means I have to keep this on until it's finished, maybe one day they will release a full 32 bit and 64 bit version.

I've used Clementine as my music manager for quite a while now but for some reason it's been causing some high cpu utilisation lately with the cooling fan sounding like a hovercraft. A bit of research seems to indicate that it's a bug Clementine and my Nvidia drivers.

Now we don't want to have to type in this line every time we want to start the app up, in KDE it's quite simple, just right click on the start button and select Edit Applications, find Clementine and replace Clementine &U with the above line.